Paes, Bhupathi advance in mixed doubles

London: Veterans Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi, along with their respective partners, advanced to the third round of the Wimbledon mixed doubles event after notching up straight-set second-round wins.

Bhupathi and his Russian partner Elena Vesnina, seeded fourth, beat Australians Stephen Huss and Anastasia Rodionova 6-2, 7-6 (3), while 14th seeds Paes and Zimbabwe's Cara Black got the better of the Dutch-Polish team of Rogier Wassen and Alicja Rosolska 6-1, 6-4.

But it was curtains for Somdev Devvarman in the men's doubles event after he and Japan's Kei Nishikori lost 3-6, 4-6, 6-7 (5) to the sixth seeded French-Serbian combine of Michael Llodra and Nenad Zimonjic in the second round yesterday.

Bhupathi and Vesnina will now be facing an American-Belarussian combination of Eric Butorac and Olga Govortsova.

On the other hand, Paes and Black will be up against the winners of the second-round match between the third seeded Serbian-Slovak pair of Nenad Zimonjic and Katarina Srebotnik and local favourites Ross Hutchins and Heather Watson.

PTI

Facebook overtakes Microsoft in UK

LONDON: Facebook overtook Microsoft websites in Britain for the first time last month, becoming the UK's second-most popular after Google as people aged over 50 flocked to social networks, online measurement body UKOM/Nielsen said.

Facebook attracted a record 26.8 million visitors in Britain in May, up 7 per cent year on year, beating the 26.2 million who visited Microsoft's MSN/WindowsLive/Bing sites combined, the organization said. Google had 33.9 million.

Twitter's UK audience jumped by a third to 6.1 million, after thousands of users retweeted allegations of celebrity scandals in defiance of gagging orders, including an extra-marital affair by Manchester United soccer star Ryan Giggs.

UKOM/Nielsen said the number of women pensioners visiting the site doubled after "Giggsgate".

"The growth in audiences to these social networks is now primarily being driven by the 50-plus age group. Just a few years ago, this group may have found itself out of place on these sites," UKOM general manager James Smythe said.

He said over-50 year-olds accounted for more new adults visiting Facebook in the last two years than under-50s, resulting in an age profile far more closely reflecting that of the UK online population as a whole than previously.

Older age groups were also more likely to visit Twitter than in the past, but under-18s were less likely to visit the site than two years ago -- which was not the case for Facebook.

Business network LinkedIn, whose market value has risen 58 per cent to $6.65 billion since its New York stock market debut last month, registered 3.6 million UK visitors in May, up 57 per cent from a year earlier.

Elsewhere, Facebook attracted 140 million visitors in the United States, up 12 per cent. In Spain its numbers were up 7 per cent, in France 18 per cent, in Italy 26 per cent and in Germany 72 per cent.

Twitter's visitor numbers rose 22 per cent in the United States, 48 per cent in France, 58 per cent in Italy and more than doubled in Spain. But in Germany they fell by 11 per cent.

UKOM/Nielsen monitored the online behaviour of about 50,000 people in Britain and similar numbers in the other countries. The panel was recruited both online and offline.